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I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.

A. S. Byatt

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A. S. Byatt
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: August 24
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Sheffield
England
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy
Antonia Susan Drabble
Antonia Susan Duffy
Even
Hermaphrodite
Thing
Hermaphrodites
Think
Venus
Thinking
Commercial
Expect
Easy
Write
Writing

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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won't be complete women. I don't think my daughters' generation has that feeling.
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Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
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I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
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In my mind's eye Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.
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It's a terrible poison, writing.
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Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
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Lists are a form of power.
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Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.
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Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. Falling in love, characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.
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I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.
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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
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I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things – once commenced – only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending – sweet or sour – and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable?
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I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.
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I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war.
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It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.
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They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side... He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.
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What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
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I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
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